 Global Economy > World Debt Threat
Author performs pop psychiatry
on George W. Bush
Special Feature:
A Connecticut Yankee hardballs the presidential family
In 1990, when Kevin Phillips wrote The Politics of Rich and Poor, the final chapter described how the first Bush Administration pivoted on a bunch of “no-talent preppies who had abandoned Middle America to take the Republican Party back to cotillions and country clubs.” Certainly, there is no love lost between the Bush family and the Connecticut author of the newly released book American Dynasty:Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. Phillips says the Bushes have suggested that the reason he wrote the book is that he had a personal animus toward them because they didn’t telephone me or invite me. “I have a long relationship with the Bushes of having no relationship,” he says. “I haven’t liked them for a long time, for a number of reasons.” Having made a personal study of the Bushes for years now, Phillips makes these often humorous observations:
You’ve got a very very unusual hybrid with George W. He’s got the interest groups behind him, but he’s got some of this Texas fundamentalist edge that the old man didn’t have. Much as I wasn’t crazy about the old man, at least he didn’t have a Middle Eastern policy that was taken out of a televangelist video on Armageddon and the end of time, [where] Baghdad is the New Babylon, and all of this is foretold and we’re acting it out. Lest you just think this is just Protestants and Christians, you’ve got a whole bunch of Jews in Israel who think a lot of the same stuff, and obviously a lot of the Islamic flakes are on basically a similar wavelength, too. It’s too bad you can’t solve all this with a limited Armageddon in which you have 2,000 participants chosen—all the flakiest churches in the [American] South, the craziest synagogues in Israel, the biggest nut cases in Islam—and they can all fight it out and it would be a Mel Gibson movie....
What’s happened with Bush is that his religious experience was probably more genuine than nongenuine, but it overlaps the collapse of oil and his more or less falling into a glass of bourbon. But as you watch the way religion has affected him, he was talking about how his faith has come to him—God wanted him to run for president. After 9/11, he said God had chosen him to lead the United States during this period. He’s never answered questions about his brand of Protestantism. Does he believe in Armageddon? Does he believe in Dominionism? Is he semi-theocratic? Several church groups said he should be quizzed on this. But I have the sense—and I go to church three times a year—he needed to be somebody after he pulled himself after the bourbon bottle, and he became somebody after he put himself in this glorified role. I think he thinks that he’s been charged with this role and that Baghdad is the second babylon. [Televangelist] Pat Robertson informed us that God told him that George W. was going to run. Obviously a lot of people are having conversations. Which agnostic is going to ask him the question? There are a lot of people in the White House press corps, but no one would want to draw attention to themselves. It’s going to take some church group....
I don’t think George W. was very happy to go back to Yale. He had some very mixed memories. But he did make the point that he was there as president and that there was a lot to be said for being a C student. So, basically, what he represents is not what the upper-class professionals represent. If he had not been named Bush, I think he would be the second vice president for the second national bank of Amarillo [Texas]....
I would say that some of the time, George W. is as stupid as he appears to be. Not all the time, because I think he’s got a certain level of smarts, and the people who know him but don’t like him think he’s a mediocre intelligence with a towel-snapping, fraternity-clothes view of the world. He’s got a sense of retail politics, but they don’t do concepts.
I’ll explain the dynastic biological problem. It has to be physiological, biological, something. Essentially, they appear to have short attention spans. They can’t sit still for very long, and they don’t want to burrow into a concept for very long. When George W. was governor, he used to like to play electronic golf in the afternoon. But when they really played golf, they played speed-it-up golf. They played 18 holes in an hour and 40 minutes. How could you do that? And the only way they would is if you had an attention-deficit problem.
But it’s not really an attention-deficit problem, and it’s not dyslexia, because he can read from a teleprompter. George W. is not dyslexic, but they think he may have something that’s somewhat similar, because he, his father and one of the grandfathers, and on the Bush side one of the great-grandfathers, they have fabulous memories. They can memorize, as George W. did, all kinds of baseball statistics. Attention deficits, don’t do concepts, can’t concentrate on things for a very long time, get bored in cabinet meetings. [Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul] O’Neill said one time he thought he had a game in there with him. But when you get these dynasties—the Hapsburgs, a lot of the Spanish kings were nuts.
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